The Breath of God. Jeffrey Small

He worked the pen cap along the permanent crease between his brows. His mother had offered to pay for Botox during his last trip to the dermatologist for his eczema. She’d said he was “too young for such worry lines,” but the last thing he wanted was to look like his frozen-faced slut of a mother. Though she’d never remarried after his father’s death, she’d always brought home plenty of men. Anyway, he thought, his face gave him a serious look, and that’s what he was: a serious man.

      “So, how’s the project going?” Duncan was still there, leaning down, his cheery voice now inches from the back of Tim’s head. Tim could feel the humid breath on his neck.

      “Fine.”

      “Great. Just great. Keep it up, buddy.”

      Tim paused the scratching of his forehead. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Elizabeth peeking around the edge of her cubicle, her nose wrinkled in disgust. He opened the metal drawer an inch and dropped the pen cap inside. For some reason, Duncan still hovered over his shoulder. His boss seemed suspicious, checking on him.

      Then a delicious thought sprang to his mind. A thought that caused him to lick his chapped lips, tasting the waxy strawberry flavor. A thought that caused him to forget his itchy skin.

      Duncan was close enough to stick with the eight-inch commando knife Tim kept in the back of his desk drawer, behind his Chapstick. In seconds he could gut his boss, just like he’d done with the hog after he’d shot it. Would Duncan’s innards stink as bad as the boar’s had?

      But then, Tim knew that killing his boss wasn’t part of God’s plan for him. No, God had something much bigger in mind. After three months of preparations, all the pieces were finally in place.

       CHAPTER 5

       PUNAKHA DZONG, BHUTAN

      I’VE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE, Grant thought as he dropped the handmade wooden crutches on the stone floor. Supporting his weight on his quivering left leg, he placed both hands on the bed, twisted his body, and swung the bulky cast up and over the thin mattress. He collapsed on the bed, grunting from the exertion as well as the throbbing in his lower body. His T-shirt was soaked through the back, and he’d only crutched down the narrow hallway once. Karma had finally acquiesced and allowed Grant to use the crutches for the fist time that morning, three weeks since the accident. According to the doctor, Grant was a week ahead of schedule, but that wasn’t good enough for Grant.

      Karma had spoken to Professor Harold Billingsly several times, updating Grant’s concerned mentor on his condition. Billingsly offered to fly over to help with Grant’s recovery, but Grant had relayed, through Karma, that he’d prefer the professor use his efforts to obtain funds to extend Grant’s dissertation deadline, again.

      Grant knew that Billingsly didn’t hold out much hope. Most of their colleagues believed he was on some kind of Holy Grail search. Their lack of faith didn’t discourage him, though. Like his father’s admonitions when he was younger, their resistance only made him want it more.

      He pushed himself into a seated position, folded his thin pillow in half behind his back, and took his laptop from the table. The doctor had been beyond helpful, bringing him his laptop, making the necessary calls to cancel his credit cards, and retrieving his passport from the hotel’s registration desk, where he’d left it for safekeeping the day of the kayaking trip.

      While Grant waited for his computer to boot up, he reflected on the hours he spent each day talking with his new friend Kinley. The monk entertained him with ancient Bhutanese tales. Grant’s favorite was one about the Buddhist master who flew on the back of a tiger to a mountainside cave. Their conversations were often like epic tennis matches with ideas being hit back and forth like a ball crossing the net at Wimbledon. Kinley continued to enjoy Grant’s frustration, however, getting that same twinkle in his eye every time Grant complained about the vagueness of a particular parable or a koan—his Buddhist riddles with no real answers.

      Grant imagined Kinley was trying to shock his mind into sudden understanding, but they approached their main topic of conversation, religion, from two very different angles. Whereas Kinley emphasized the importance of one’s personal experience of one’s religion, Grant viewed this approach as putting too much emphasis on subjective psychological states. The mystical, in his opinion, was only a step away from the supernatural. Instead, Grant believed that the historical and cultural study of religion better explained the competing doctrines of the various religions of the world. Grant had been raised in the church, his father a preacher, but ever since his teen years, he’d rejected the emphasis on the supernatural that was too often present in his own tradition.

      What Grant understood now was that he was tantalizingly close to uncovering the key to his research and his future career. After his initial shock at having disclosed in his sleep his reasons for being in Bhutan, he’d been rewarded when Kinley told him several stories he’d never heard before about the mysterious Indian saint Issa. Grant could barely contain his excitement, but when he asked Kinley how he knew these stories, Kinley avoided answering. Yet something in the way Kinley told the stories caught his attention. It was as if Kinley were speaking from firsthand knowledge.

      Grant recalled when he first learned the legend of Issa during his second year of graduate school. Russian journalist Nicholas Notovitch, who was traveling in northern India near Kashmir in 1887, made an extraordinary discovery at the Himis monastery in the town of Ladakh—the same monastery Grant had visited before coming to Bhutan. The ancient manuscript he saw told the story of Issa, who left his home as a teenager to explore the secret wisdom of the sages in the Himalayas. It was said that these wise men knew the mystery behind life and death. After Notovitch returned to the West and published a translation of the text, the original disappeared from the monastery. Notovitch was then portrayed as a fraud and pilloried by the academic community, and the story faded into obscurity.

      Grant had wondered if anyone had ever followed up on this disappearance, and he made it his quest to uncover whatever became of the text, but none of the scholars he consulted could recall any further investigation. The whole story had been buried. Based on his original research and the tip he’d learned in India, Grant hypothesized that the Issa manuscript had been moved to another Buddhist monastery sometime after the publication of Notovitch’s book in 1894, in order to prevent the world limelight from shining on bucolic Himis. The thought that the treasure may have been moved to Bhutan—to this monastery even—started to torture him. He needed to be up, mobile, and investigating the grounds.

      Grant deliberated over whether to come right out and tell Kinley how important the Issa story was to him. But as kind as Kinley had been, could he really trust him? He suspected that Kinley knew more than he was saying, and he was different from the monks at Himis. As an Oxford grad, he understood the workings of Western scholarship, and he had to realize the effect that the Issa legend would have on millions of people. Grant would keep working on him.

      A gentle knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. “Come in.”

      Kinley entered, dressed in neat orange robes and carrying a small fern in a clay pot. “Since you cannot venture outside yet, I brought some of it to you.”

      “Who knows when I’ll be able to climb down those treacherous steps of yours. I can barely hobble down the hallway.” Grant was grateful for his friend’s attention to the small things, but it was not his style to be overcomplimentary.

      Kinley placed the plant on the wooden desk by the small window. “Old buildings in Bhutan used ladders between floors because they took up less space than true steps. When our people began constructing staircases, they built them like the ladders to which they were accustomed, steep and narrow.”

      “How did you carry me up here?”

      “You were unconscious.” Kinley chuckled.

      Something on the fern caught Kinley’s eye. He bent close to the plant, tilting his head. He then extended his hand, gently touching one of the leaves. Next, Kinley brought his fingers to his face, rotating them as he studied the curiosity. After a minute,